The field of behavioral cybernetics has convincingly demonstrated that mutual exchanges between parents and infants during caretaking, play, and transporting activities is critical for both infant development and the development of positive family relationships. While there are an abundance of devices to restrain and secure infants during rest, play and caretaking activities, as far as we can determine, no devices have been invented to facilitate, enhance, and differentiate the efforts of newborns and thereby facilitate mutuality between infants and parents. Nor are there devices explicitly created to maximize mutual exchanges between parents and infants to enhance mutual learning between them.
In utero, babies live in a coherent, self generated world that fits their bodies and facilitates their ability to function. They are able to sit, stand, kneel and lie down. By moving their body parts and pushing against the walls of their environment they can make the motions of walking, crawling and even somersaulting. At birth they leave that world. They enter a world created by, and primarily for, grown-ups. This new world is often not designed to facilitate their growth and development. Neither is this world designed to facilitate the development of positive habits of relating between the newborn and other family members.
The principle object of the present invention is a set of pillows which were invented to remedy the foregoing condition, and which are characterized by multiple functions.
A further object is to bridge the gap between the physical conditions of interuterine life which fits the form and function of the developing fetus. To that of neonatal life in a world created by big people, for big people with little attention to the spatial, temporal or dynamic requirements of infants. The shapes and sizes of the pillows are intended to enable the baby to continue to do what was possible before birth with the help of participating parents.
An additional object is to assist newborn/infants to differentiate their body parts thereby enhancing their developmental base in the first few months of life. The carefully chosen forms of pillows for this purpose give systematic experience in every possible joint function for both the parent and infant even without the parent having specific knowledge of these functions.
Another object is to factor the physical space between parents and infants so that they both have optimized ranges of motion relative to each other during caretaking, play, and transporting interactions. The pillow set of this invention provides the spatial conditions between the small bodies of the infants and the huge (by comparison) bodies of adults that make it possible for baby and adult to meet on equal ground where exchanges can be mutual in nature right from the first moments of the infants' life.
Another object is to have the pillows serve as a medium to encourage mutual exchanges between infants and parents even without the parents having an intellectual or conceptual understanding of how to go about it. The parents can use the pillows in diverse ways to position themselves so that their efforts can match those of their infant in force, timing and use of space. In this way the pillow set serves to encourage and aid parents and infants in establishing effective patterns of relating without doctrinaire and theoretical instructions of how parents should relate to babies.
A further object is to use the pillows for factoring the environment for adults for their own comfort and improved function.